Flynn's Harp: Remember Thomas for career, not her comment (6-9-10)

Helen Thomas, who as a White House correspondent has been peppering presidents with prickly questions since before the current occupant of the White House was born, deserves a better career climax than the sudden end that occurred for her this week.

The 89-year-old Thomas, role model for decades of women journalists and admired by many for her willingness to confront the powerful, resigned in the wake of an unacceptable comment about Jews needing to “get the hell out of Palestine.”

It’s doubtful if anyone with a television or a computer could have missed the avalanche of comments that has dominated websites and blogs since the video interview with her by a rabbi with a website called rabbilive.com surfaced last weekend.

No one could or would defend the unacceptable comment she made to the rabbi after he spotted her at a Jewish Heritage Day event at the White House late last month and came up with a microphone to get her to make a comment about Israel.

Some bloggers have suggested the rabbi bushwhacked her. And he likely got the kind of comment he was after when he spotted her in the crowd and came up to interview her. But he didn’t put the words in her mouth.

The interview became viral in 24 hours after it surfaced last weekend, the video taking over the Internet and the torrent of comments it unleashed dominating blogs and newspaper columns. The interview came before, but began gaining traction after, the death of nine activists as Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.

But amidst what one well-regarded political blogger named Robert Scheer characterized as a “media tirade” against her that he described “as illogical as it is hysterical” has come the suggestion that the body of work and accomplishments of 60 years shouldn’t be washed away with a single unacceptable comment.

“The few sentences uttered by her were, as she quickly acknowledged, wrong, deeply so I would add,” Scheer wrote in his truthdig blog. “But they cannot justify the road-rage destruction of the dean of the Washington press corps. Suddenly this heroic woman who broke so many gender barriers and dared to challenge presidential arrogance was reduced to nothing more than the stereo-typical anti-Israel Arab that is so fashionable to hate.”

It was a little more than a year ago that Thomas was honored at Washington State University as she and senior CBS White House correspondent Robert Schieffer received lifetime achievement awards at the 35^th annual Edward R. Murrow Symposium.

Because she and I once worked for the same wire service, she a major figure covering presidents for United Press International while I operated down in the relative anonymity of covering governors and legislatures, I got to spend a couple of days with her in Pullman, basically carrying luggage for an old lady.

And in numerous conversations with her during those few days in Pullman, what emerged was the sense of a person irate at the use of military force, whether by the U.S. or Israel. The former was evidenced by her sharp questions of then-President George Bush over the Iraq war in particular and the latter by questions about the U.S. role in the Middle East that made her hated by Israeli lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.

Thomas, a Lebanese-American who grew up in Detroit and joined UPI in 1943, moving to the White House beat during Dwight Eisenhower’s last year as president, is widely known as a critic of Israel. But our conversations made it clear she’s a harsh critic of the Israeli government and what she views as its militarism, not of the citizens of that nation.

Many viewed her penetrating and critical questions posed to Bush, particularly about the war in Iraq, during news conferences as proof that she was liberal. It was a sense that created a virtual hatred of her among Bush Administration officials and GOP leaders.

Thus when President Obama called on her at his first news conference last year, he smiled expectantly, apparently thinking he’d get a softball question. Instead she weighed in with a zinger and a hard-nosed follow-up question that brought a furrow to Obama’s brow.

After her ill-considered comments raised the fire storm, she was forced to resign from Hearst, the company that she’d worked for as a columnist since leaving the then-dead wire service in 1980, and issued an apology.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League said the apology wasn’t acceptable. Refusal to accept an apology is a somewhat untenable position since when the Israeli government apologized after 23-year-old Olympia activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer on the Gaza strip as she sought to keep Palestinian homes from being bulldozed, it was accepted.

And just today, the Israeli government apologized for sending the press a link to an online video parodying last week’s deadly commando raid on the flotilla of pro-Gaza activists, an apology they hope will suffice. So someone with more savvy is likely to advise the executive of the Anti-Defamation League to be quiet.

Thomas turns 90 in August. And hopefully some group, ideally a women’s organization, will have the courage to say the litany of firsts in her resume and the barriers she broke on behalf of women deserve recognition. So does the courage she evidenced as a front-row journalist to ask the questions no one else wanted to ask to help keep 11 presidents on an honest track.

It’s a recognition that would be more than appropriate as an honor for her contributions, rather than having the memory of those contributions ravaged by reaction to a single mistake. Hopefully some organization will have the courage to do her that service and be willing to put down anyone who would be so small as to think she should be denied that.

A former female colleague at UPI was quoted as saying she hoped the end of Thomas’ career “does not taint a long and important legacy.” It’s important that some group picks up Thomas’ banner to ensure the legacy is recognized.